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Guest opinion: Gun control, Australian style

By Paul Dougan

Posted:
01/04/2013 01:00:00 AM MST

With increased calls for gun control in America, particularly a renewed ban on assault weapons, comes news of Australia, a land where intelligent gun control works. For a time, Australia was experiencing an almost-annual mass murder. Then, after the Port Arthur massacre of April 1996, where with a semi-automatic, 35 were killed and 23 wounded, a newly elected Prime Minister, working with state governments, pulled together a national ban on semi-automatic weapons and pump shotguns. Since then, Australia's worst killing has been the 2002 Monash University incident where a disgruntled graduate student, armed with six loaded handguns, killed two and wounded five.

The Australian ban was retroactive, making it illegal to buy, sell or resell a semi-automatic, to repair one, to possess one -- everything. In return, the government paid owners of banned weapons market value for their guns plus ten percent. A massive government buyback then yielded over 631,000 weapons of various types.

Gun ownership has been as integral to Australia's history as it has to America's, yet eighty-five percent of Australians supported the legislation; many Aussie hunters agreed with the ban, noting that only a "city boy" needs a semi-automatic to kill an animal.

In addition, Australia carefully licenses all gun owners; thus, if an interview shows that you live with a violent and disturbed person, you may own a gun, but you have to store it elsewhere.

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Consider, then, the arguments we hear against gun control in America:

"Any gun control will lead to all gun control -- guns outlawed, the Second Amendment crucified!" Well, Australians still own handguns and other firearms. Our Supreme Court has ruled that gun restrictions can be Constitutional, so who says the Second Amendment guarantees the right to own an assault weapon? The NRA, that's who.

"Gun control won't work." Well, Australia has effectively ended "mass murder" -- only one two-death, five-injury shooting in over 16 years. And Australian gun-control activist and expert Rebecca Peters reports that gun deaths in general, including gun-induced suicides, are down by about 50 percent.

"You'll never stop all the killing." So, we shouldn't even try? The kind of dramatic results Australia has achieved are worth it.

"I could probably murder someone with a spork if I really chose to; so, what are you going to do? Outlaw sporks?" It's a faulty analogy, and people aren't perpetrating mass murders with sporks, rope, cars or can openers. And as we saw in the in 2002 Australian killings, even a murderer armed with six loaded handguns was nowhere near as lethal as a killer armed with a semi-automatic.

"I target shoot with a semi-automatic. Why should I be punished?" Because it'll help save hundreds of lives. Target shoot with something else.

"The solution is to have more decent, law-abiding Americans armed and to turn American schools into fortresses." Of late, American mass murderers aren't just carrying semi-automatic weapons: they're wearing bullet-proof vests. Even if you have a firearm handy, in the spray of bullets coming at you, you'll need a lucky shot to the lunatic's head. So, this isn't practical.

The NRA is right that we should defend our schools (apparently, the Newtown, Conn. school didn't have a police officer). To our credit, many Colorado public schools do have a police officer and usually a police car parked prominently out front, but do we want to place our public-safety officers in that kind of harm's way? Force them to wear bullet-proof vests and carry semi-automatics to fight back on equal terms? Turn our schools into combat zones?

"Violent video games are the problem!" Yes, there are several causes for our national mass-murder epidemic, but it's dishonest to act as if the availability of semi-automatic weapons isn't the biggest one of them.

"The Connecticut killings -- it's just the way things are. They're tragic, but it's like a plane crash (flying is still statistically safest) or an earthquake (nothing you can do about it)." Faulty analogies again. These killings aren't flukes; they're part of a terrible and growing pattern. Stop trivializing the slaughter. And as a society, we created this problem, we're responsible for it, we can end it.

"American gun owners are being demonized!" Hysterical NRA demagoguery. The real victims are those murdered and maimed in assaults with semi-automatic weapons.

California Senator Feinstein will soon introduce a new ban on assault weapons. Not retroactive, it would leave millions of semi-automatics in circulation. We need a full ban; we need to follow the Australian example: a sensible, proven path that respects the gun rights of citizens while keeping wannabe mass murderers away from their weapon of choice.

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